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must find my way back to the brig against which the two ships were
lying and start afresh from her; since it was pretty certain that it
was there, by boarding the wrong ship, that I had got off my course.
But because of my certain knowledge of what horridness the brig
sheltered, and of the noisome stench that I must encounter there, it
took a good deal of resolution to put this plan into practice; so
much, indeed, that for a while I wavered about it, and succeeded at
last in starting back again only by setting going the full force of
my will.
But I need not have whipped myself on to my work so resolutely, nor
have fretted myself in advance with planning the rush that I should
make across the brig when I came to her—for I never, so far as I
know, laid eyes on her again. For a little while, as in my first
turn-about, I found my way backward without much difficulty—though
again the different look that the ships had as I returned across them
pulled me up from time to time with doubts about them; and then, just
as before, I came to a place where more than one line of advance was
open to me and there went wrong—as I knew a little later by finding
myself aboard a vessel so strange in her appearance that my first
glimpse over her deck satisfied me that I saw her then for the
first time.
This craft was an old-fashioned sloop-of-war, carrying eighteen guns;
and that she had perished in action was as evident as that her
death-battle had been fought a long while back in the past. The
mauling that she had received had made an utter wreck of her—her
masts being shot away and hanging by the board, most of her bulwarks
being splintered, and her whole stern torn open as though a crashing
broadside had been poured into her at short range. Moreover, nearly
all her guns had been dismounted, and two of them had burst in
firing—as the shattered gun-carriages showed.
But what most strongly proved the fierceness of her last action, and
the length of time that had passed since she fought it, were the
scores of skeletons lying about her deck—a few with bits of clothing
hanging fast to them, but most of them clean fleshless naked bones.
Just as they had fallen, there they lay: with legs or arms or ribs
splintered or carried off by the shot which had struck them, or with
bullet-holes clean through their skulls. But the sight of them, while
it put a sort of awe upon me, did not horrify me; because time
had done its cleansing work with them and they were pure.
Indeed, my imagination was taken such fast hold of by coming upon this
thrilling wreck of ancient sea-battle, fought out fiercely to a finish
generations before ever I was born, that for a little while I forgot
my own troubles entirely; and so got over the shock which my first
sight of the riddled sloop and her dead crew had given me by proving
that again I had lost my way. And my longing to know all that I could
find out about it—backed by the certainty that I should not come upon
anything below that would revolt me—led me to go searching in the
shattered cabin for some clue to the sloop’s name and nationality, and
to the cause in which her death-fight had been fought.
The question of nationality was decided the moment that I set my foot
within the cabin doorway—there being a good deal of light there,
coming in through the broken stern—by my seeing stretched over a
standing bed-place in a stateroom to starboard an American flag; and
the flag, taken together with the ancient build of the sloop, also
settled the fact pretty clearly that the action which had finished her
must have been fought with an English vessel in the War of 1812.
Under the flag I could make out faintly the lines of a human figure,
and I knew that one of the sloop’s officers—most likely her
commander, from the respect shown to him by covering him with the
colors—must be lying there, just as his men had placed him to wait
for a sea-burial until the fighting should come to an end. And that he
had remained there was proof that not a man of the sloop’s company but
had been killed outright in the fight or had got his death-wound in
it; and also of the fact that in a way the fight had been a
victory—since it was evident that the enemy had not taken possession,
and therefore must have been beaten off.
But the whole matter was settled clearly by my finding the sloop’s
log-book lying open on the cabin table, just as it had lain there, and
had entries made in it, while the action was going on. And a very
strange thrill ran through me as I read on the mouldy page in brown
faint letters the date, “October 5, 1814,” and across the page-head,
in bigger brown faint letters: “U.S. Sloop-of-war Wasp“: and so knew
that I was aboard of that stinging little war-sloop—whereof the
record is a bright legend, and the fate a mystery, of our Navy—which
in less than three months’ time successively fought and whipped three
English war-vessels—the ship Reindeer and the brigs Avon and
Atalanta, all of them bigger than herself—and then, being last
sighted in September, 1814, not far from the Azores, vanished with all
her crew and officers from off the ocean and never was seen nor
heard of again.
There before me in the mouldy log-book was the record of her last
action—and in gallantry it led the three others which have made
her fame.
The entries began at 7.20 A.M. with: “A strange sail in sight on the
weather bow;” at 7.45 followed: “The strange brig bearing down on us.
Looks English”; and at 8.10: “The strange brig has shown English
colors.” Then came the manoeuvring for position, covering more than an
hour, and the beating to general quarters; and after that the short
entries ran on quickly—in such rough and ready writing as might be
expected of a man dashing in for a moment to make them, and then
dashing out again to where the fighting was going on:
“9.20 A.M. Engaged the enemy with our starboard battery,
hulling him severely.
“9.24. Our foremast by the board.
“9.28. The enemy’s broadside in our stern. Great havoc.
“9.35. The wreck of the foremast cleared, giving us steerage way.
“9.40. Our hulling fire telling. The enemy’s battery fire
slacking. His musketry fire very hot and galling.
“9.45. The enemy badly hulled. More than half of our crew
now killed or disabled.
“9.52. Our mainmast by the board and our mizzen badly
wounded. Action again very severe. Few of our men left.
“9.56. Captain Blakeley killed and brought below.
“10.01. Our mizzen down. The enemy’s fire slacking again.
“10.10. The enemy sheering off, with the look of being
sinking.
“10.15. The enemy sinking. We cannot help him. Most of our men are
dead. All of us living are badly hurt.”
And there the entries came to an end.
My breath came fast as I read that short record of as brave a fight as
ever was fought on salt water; and when my reading was finished I
gave a great sigh. It was a fit ending for the little Wasp, that
death triumphant: and it was a fit ending to a fight between American
and English sailors that they should hang at each other’s throats,
neither yielding, until they died that way—they being each of a
nation unaccustomed to surrender, and both of the one race which alone
in modern times has held the sea.
XIXOF A GOOD PLAN THAT WENT WRONG WITH ME
For a while I was so stirred by the enthusiasm which my discovery
aroused in me that I had no room in my mind for any other thoughts.
But at last, as I still stood pondering in the Wasp’s cabin, I
became aware that the daylight was fading into darkness; and as I
realized what that meant for me my thoughts came back suddenly to
myself, and then all my enthusiasm ebbed away.
I came out upon the deck again, but leaving everything as I had found
it—my momentary impulse to lift the flag having vanished as I felt
how fit it was that this dead battle-captain should rest on
undisturbed where his men had laid him beneath the colors that he had
died for; and I was glad to find when I got into the open that a good
deal of daylight still remained. But it was so far gone, and was
waning so rapidly, that I saw that I had little chance of getting back
to the Hurst Castle before nightfall; and that the most that I could
hope for was to make a start in the right direction—and perhaps to
find a wreck to sleep on that had food and water aboard of it, and
thence take up my search again the next day.
Yet the dread was strong upon me, as I looked around upon the wrecks
among which the Wasp was bedded, that I might not only be unable to
find the Hurst Castle again, but ever to find my way across that
tangle to the outer edges of it—where only was it possible that ships
on which were provisions fit for eating would be found. The very fact
that the Wasp had settled into her position more than fourscore
years back made it certain that she was deep in the labyrinth; and the
strange old-fashioned look of the craft surrounding her showed me that
I should have to go far before finding a vessel wrecked in
recent times.
But these disheartening thoughts I crushed down as well as I could,
yet not making much of it; and as trying to go back by the way that I
had come to the Wasp would not serve any good purpose—even
supposing that I could have managed it, which was not likely—I went
on beyond her on a new course: taking a longish jump from her
quarter-rail and landing on the deck of a clumsy little ill-shapen
brig, with a high-built square stern and a high-built bow that was
pretty nearly square too. She was Dutch, I fancy, and a merchant
vessel; but she carried a little battery of brass six-pounders, and
had also a half dozen pederaros set along her rail. And by her
carrying these old-fashioned swivel-guns—which proved that she had
got her armament not much later than the middle of the last
century—and by the general look of her, I knew that she was an older
vessel even than the Wasp.
This observation, and the reflection growing out of it that the deeper
I went into the Sargasso Sea the older must be the craft bedded in
it—since that great dead fleet is recruited constantly by new wrecks
drifting in upon its outer edges from all ways seaward—put into my
head what seemed to me to be a very reasonable plan for finding my way
back to the Hurst Castle again; or, at least, to some other newly
come in hulk on which there would be fresh water and sound food. And
this was to shape my course by considering attentively the look of
each wreck that I came aboard of, and the look of those surrounding
it, and by then going forward to whichever one of them seemed to be of
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